Saturday, 15 August 2015

Why Does He Want to Hurt Kindergartners?

Wood anemone, a childhood favourite.

Why Does He
Want to Hurt Kindergartners?

Two groups
that are strong advocates in early childhood education

(Defending
the Early Years and the Alliance for Childhood),

released a
report called Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to
Lose (seehttp://deyproject.org/2015/01/13/our-new-report-reading-instruction-in-kindergarten-little-to-gain-and-much-to-lose/).
They claim there is no research base

for the
importance of learning to read in kindergarten

(so that its
inclusion in the Common Core as a goal for K is potentially harmful).

I think they
are wrong about the research here, but wanted to seek out your reaction.

Does research
suggest that learning to read, especially as indicated in the Common Core,

is associated
with long-term positive or negative effects?

Great question.
This is one that I’ve been thinking about since I was 5-years-old (no, really).

My mom asked my
kindergarten teacher if she should do anything with me to help

and the teacher
discouraged any efforts in that regard. At the time, the “experts” believed that
any early academic learning was damaging to children—to their academic futures
and to their psyches.

When I became a
first-grade teacher, we were still holding back on such teaching,

at least during
the first-semester of grade one. We didn't want to cause the mental
disabilities, academic failure, and vision problems predicted by the
anti-teaching types.

These days we
are doing a great job of protecting poverty children and minority children

from this kind
of damage. Of course, many of us middle-class white parents are risking our own
kids. It is not uncommon these days for suburban kids to enter first-grade,

and even
kindergarten, knowing how to read.

As I’ve written
before, I taught both of my kids to read before they entered school.

There are not
now, and there never have been data showing any damage to kids

from early
language or literacy learning—despite the overheated claims of the G. Stanley
Halls, Arnold Gessells, Hans Furths and David Elkinds (and many others).

Let me first
admit that if you seek studies that randomly assign kids

either to
kindergarten literacy instruction and no kindergarten literacy instruction

and then follow
those kids through high school or something… there are no such studies

and I very much
doubt that there will be.

Given how strong
the evidence is on the immediate benefits of early literacy instruction

I don’t think a
scholar could get ethics board approval to conduct such a study.

That it wouldn’t
be ethical to withhold such teaching for research purposes should give pause.

If it isn’t
ethical to do it for research, should it be ethical to do so for philosophical
reasons? Yikes.

What we do have
is a lot of data showing that literacy instruction improves the literacy skills

of the kids who
receive that instruction in preschool and kindergarten, and another body of
research showing that early literacy skills predict later reading and academic
achievement

(and, of course,
there is another literature showing the connections between academic success

and later
economic success). There are studies showing that the most literate kids

are the ones who
are emotionally strongest

and there is
even research on Head Start programs showing that as we have improved

the early
literacy skills in those programs, emotional abilities have improved as well.

And, as for the
claim that early teaching makes no difference,

I wonder why our
fourth-graders are performing at the highest levels ever according to NAEP?

The studies
showing the immediate benefits to literacy and language functioning from
kindergarten instruction are summarized in the National Early Literacy Panel
Report which is available on line.

And here are
some of studies showing the long-term benefits of early literacy achievement:

and the
performance at each of these levels is predictive of later levels.

If a youngster
is behind in reading in grade 3, then he/she would likely still be behind in
high school, which can have a serious and deleterious impact on content
learning (science, history,

literature,
math), high school graduation rates, and economic viability

(the students’
college and career readiness).

The research
seems clear to me: teach kids reading early and then build on those early
reading skills as they progress through school. Don’t expect early skills alone
to transfer to higher later skills;

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